Oh, but it was conmoditized even then. Roman society was suprisingly „modern” on many fields, and their approach to art was no exception. Rich paid the creators to create such art on their properties to increase their value.

Yeah but it was more like “Kanye West paying someone to paint his crib” than “‘middle-class couple hiring a local guy to do up their flat”. Rich people were few and far between.

Fine art was available to more of the population than you'd think. The world population doubled in the past 45 years. In contrast, during the Roman period, the world population took about 500 years to double.

Wealth accumulated over generations. In that time, if your great-great-great grandfather had a piece of artwork, there was a good chance it was yours now.

We have negative stereotypes of the past, and there were periods of history when that was true, but there were advanced periods too. The Bronze Age empires were pretty impressive until roughly 1300 BC. We had a dark age for a while. The Roman Empire was very impressive. Then we had a dark age for a while.

And you also want to think of the social structure. Rich people employed poor people in households. Even if I owned nothing personally, I'd be exposed to art in my master's household.

Except something like 98% of the population were farmers and most of them were never allowed into a rich man’s house

More like 70% to 90%, just the city of Rome got up to 750k-1M people let alone all the other cities in the empire. A great deal of this was due to Egyptian farmers ability to grow multiple crops per year on the same land. Fishing was similarly extremely productive in terms of labor to food production.

I remember reading somewhere that urbanization in Roman Empire was higher than before and after. Like 20% or something.

This is not really true. The rich (patricians) formed entire houses and used combination of wealth and political influence to maintain their positions. Even if their number wasnt greater than few thousands, they de-facto owned the Italy during Roman Republic.

Relatively speaking, they were most numerous within Rome, but they also owned lands they had lower class people and slaves farm for them that they sometimes visited.

You are describing art being commercialized, but not commoditized; a one-off commission based artwork is not a commodity.

I can look online now and see beautiful art whenever I want. In magazines and books beautiful imagery is ubiquitous.

Art is just a thing we expect to see now and is easily reproduced. We are surrounded by it. This is why I chose "commoditized".

Imagine how inspiring it would be for modern folks today to see these mosaics in their own homes instead of... carpeting. Rugs are cool. Wall to wall carpeting is gross, and unimaginative. I am not a fan.

A few years ago I was in Fez, stayed in a 600 year old riad with original tile. And yes it was breathtaking and inspiring every day. A few days before, I was in Volubilis (وليلي)a long abandoned Roman town. Every home had these mosaic tiled floors.

Even 100 year old buildings have a craftsmanship about them that is gone in modern stick frame apartments. I wonder if we would ever see a real art deco building again, with all the polish and craftsmanship, and not something that's just art deco 'style' and severely diluted into a cheap generic building, but the real deal. Maybe there just aren't enough people trained in those stone working skills anymore. Maybe no one is willing to pay for nicer things.

Replacement cost tends to factor greatly into how much things stick around. Cheap stuff gets replaced over the years, expensive stuff gets maintained and fixed up so you get a lot of survivorship bias.

Additionally, labor becomes cheaper relative to materials the farther back you go in history so older stuff has proportionately more labor put into it. Having a bunch of fancy ornate wood work in your house was the 100yo equivalent of having a bunch of granite countertops.

But that's the thing, even the fancy stuff today doesn't have much of the fit and finish of modest stuff in the past. Go find a new construction apartment commanding top of market rent in your town, and I bet you can hear your neighbors through those paper thin walls and the appliances are new, but the cheapest ones possible. Mansions became McMansions. Compare the Broad in LA to the library build 100 years before; the materials in the $140mm Broad are bare concrete and latex paint, while the LA central library looks like a Byzantine palace.

Old woodwork in houses is pretty much always excellent. Why? There was way, way more top-quality lumber available (they'd "throw away" giant near-perfect timbers in framing, including using huge load-bearing pieces along foundations that'd cost thousands of dollars each today, assuming you could find something similar at all) and you couldn't get away with doing bad woodwork—because there was no air conditioning and heat wasn't as good as it is today! Badly-installed woodwork that didn't have great corners and joins, didn't account for wood grain and cut and position pieces accordingly, use properly aged lumber of a suitable quality, and so on, would simply fall apart between temperature and humidity swings over the years, probably so fast it'd come back to bite whoever did the shoddy work in the ass. Well-build wood finishes, meanwhile, can break a century and still be almost perfect, with little or no maintenance (aside from repairing outright accidental damage, of course, and keeping water from getting in the structure). But we don't really make those anymore.

If someone wants really nice wood trim, mantlepieces, panelling, and such in a modern house, it seems they usually loot it from an old house. The materials and work are too expensive now to make it from scratch. Ditto doors, of all things. Modern interior and exterior doors are awful compared to solid wood doors that were common not even that long ago, but, though you can still buy them, new solid doors are impractically expensive, so buying salvaged old doors usually makes more sense.

Lived for a while in an apartment building put up about 1910/20, so indeed pushing a century. Solid oak doors. The banisters (railings on the stairs) also solid oak. Duplicated would cost a fortune today with newly cut wood.

> Go find a new construction apartment commanding top of market rent in your town, and I bet you can hear your neighbors through those paper thin walls and the appliances are new, but the cheapest ones possible.

Not really true, I rented more upscale apartment once and, unlike my previous apartment, I couldn’t hear neighbors due to much better sound isolation. Appliances and cabinets were much nicer too.

> We take beautiful art for granted today

Many but not all of us do. Every time I think about all the beauty that was created in the Classical Antiquity or the Renaissance (or any other less Eurocentric moment of widespread creative spark), and how it contrasts with nearly everyone today who is seemingly hellbent on making "critical" pieces for the sake of being critical.

I understand that we need to raise awareness of certain issues, that art is also politics, that a lot "has already been done", that art expresses intent and not only depicts reality (or idealized imagery). I understand all of that, but it seems we've somehow lost track of how art can also be made just... for the sake of beauty

There's a reason hordes of tourists flock to Florence all year long, you know? Let's build more of that unquestionable beauty that transcends generations.

Some art is imagination-drawn, lusciously-filmed cinema, some art is raw documentary. These days, many in between.